Sunday 1 July 2007 19.12 EDT
First published on Sunday 1 July 2007 19.12 EDT

It has been a good five days, made even better by the slice of luck with which Gordon Brown's premiership began. Inside the cabinet, Paddy Ashdown - obliged to argue for Liberal policies - would have been a grain of sand that irritated without becoming a pearl. By declining Brown's offer, he spared the cabinet hours of tedium and made his party look more interested in confrontation than in compromise.

Some Labour party members will regard Brown's ecumenical initiative as proof that he is not genuine Labour. But, tribal politician though I am, and despite my instinctive distaste for turncoats, I cannot see why it is wrong to enlist new adherents to the government's cause. All prime ministers hope to attract high-profile recruits. Alun Chalfont, the Times's defence correspondent who joined Harold Wilson's Foreign Office, was said to have become a peer, a privy councillor, a minister and a member of the Labour party in one afternoon. If Lord Digby Jones assists in the pursuit of a genuine Labour industrial policy, I do not care how he would have voted at the next election had his peerage not prevented him from voting at all. It is the policies that matter, and on evidence of the past five days, the policies are going to improve.

When Alan Johnson announced that hard-working doctors and nurses had to be convinced that their skills and dedication were properly valued and respected, he was gently breaking the news that the days of oppressive health service targets were over. In the speech with which Brown accepted the Labour leadership, he was explicit that local authorities and housing associations were essential allies in the drive to build affordable houses for rent as well as sale. The doctrinaire reliance on speculative building that has left Britain scandalously short of low-cost accommodation has been rejected at last. The changes in health and housing policy are no more than common sense. But social democracy and common sense often go hand in hand. Almost everything Brown did last week - what he said and how he said it - suggests that common sense is on the way in and celebrity politics on the way out.

Of course, the prime minister has already said and done some things of which most Labour party members disapprove. Labour prime ministers always do. There will be almost universal disappointment that he has endorsed the city academy programme by reappointing Andrew Adonis as schools minister.

But I served happily, and with a clear conscience, in Jim Callaghan's cabinet for two years after his notorious Ruskin speech had begun the counter-revolution against the comprehensive system. In politics you can rarely have it all your own way. The best we can do is hope to identify shared aims. Brown's policies would undoubtedly reduce the inequalities that scar our society. If he chooses to call them "modernisation", egalitarians should not choke on the word.

Thirty years ago (when "modernisation" was called "revisionism") we Croslandites argued that change was essential to achieve our goals. The problem arises when, instead of looking for a new and improved version of social democracy, we search for an alternative. Charles Leadbeater, once an adviser to Tony Blair, said the problem with New Labour was that it was neither new enough nor Labour enough. Brown shows every sign of remedying both mistakes.

The paradox of Brown's success last week was the way in which he managed, despite the appointment of half a dozen Liberal advisers, to remain undisputedly Labour. That was immensely reassuring to more people than the tightly knit group of politically motivated men and women who regarded Blair as an apostate. The continuing commitment to long-held principles gives a politician "bottom", while ideologically footloose ministers encourage the question: "Do they really believe in anything except winning the next election?"

Therein lies the second paradox. By demonstrating that there is more to politics than winning, Brown is making winning more likely. So, I feel more content with the political prospect than at any time since, 13 years ago, I spent the evening with John Smith after telling him I was leaving parliament. That night it seemed that a genuine Labour prime minister would soon form a proper Labour government - cautious, moderate but essentially radical. That hope was extinguished on the following Friday. Today it is alive again.